Hammer Drills Are No Good

[crokett]

according to Lowes. They have a handy color-coded chart by their drill bits to help you select the right one. They say hammer drills are not good for drilling wood, regular drills are better. In concrete, stone, etc, hammer drills are no good, rotary hammers are better. So that begs the question, what are they good for then?

[leehljp]

What is in a name? Makita lists some of theirs as "rotary hammer drills"!

Kind of like "Smart" phones - they were phones that ran applications in addition to mail etc. Now even phones that had "games" on them are being referred to as "smart" phones in some wording ploys.

REbranding and re-wording is usually a sales ploy more than a reality. It bugs me when companies do these "word plays" to distinguish itself rather than quality and function. I have a hammer drill that was excellent for drilling holes up to 4 inches deep in concrete. I just put the setting on "hammer" and it did a quick job.

Personally, I think the attitude that Lowes presents in that case is wrong - the ability to drill in wood or concrete is not a direct function of the drill body but the drill head. When a Hammer Drill is set to "drill" it is a normal drill and no one will know the difference - in the feel of drilling wood as compared to a straight drill in drilling wood. When it is set to "hammer" it acts like a "rotary hammer drill" on a light weight scale that certainly will not be confused with "Drilling wood". Maybe my experience is different from Lowes distinctions because of my use of Japanese versions of tools.

Now if I were doing this 12 hours a day 5 and 6 days a week I WOULD invest in a job specific tool.

[aggrex]

according to Lowes. They have a handy color-coded chart by their drill bits to help you select the right one. They say hammer drills are not good for drilling wood, regular drills are better. In concrete, stone, etc, hammer drills are no good, rotary hammers are better. So that begs the question, what are they good for then?

The chart may be over-simplified and yet possibly accurate if the hammering function is NOT turned off while drilling wood and rotary sds drills do perform better when drilling larger/deeper holes in concrete/stone. Marketing favoring more expensive sds drills can improve profits.....

My hammer drill does a nice job on tapcons and smaller holes.

[radhak]

what Lee said. My craftsman hammer-drill is one of the epiphanic 'why did I not get this earlier?' acquisitions.

But I'm intrigued - what really is a rotary hammer drill?

[RAFlorida]

Ain't no difference.

Higher priced units usually are called rotary hammer drill.
The concept is the same.

[crokett]

This was more tongue-in-cheek than anything else. I own a hammer drill that does just fine drilling through brick, bock and concrete. Wood too, when it is not in hammer mode. The few times I have used the concrete bit to go ghrough the rim joist and then the brick facade on on my house, it has worked quite well in hammer mode.

I've always thought a rotary hammer was just a bigger version of what I have.

[JimD]

I have a very inexpensive hammer drill, I think it is a skill, that switches from regular drill to hammer drill. It is very nice to have for drilling holes for tapcons - relatively small holes. I have also used it to drill through the brick veneer of my house to attach a ledger board. Again, it did well. I haven't tried larger holes in aged concrete or hard stone but I suspect it will be better by far than a regular drill but still will be pretty slow going.

The way my drill work, which is typical of lesser models, is it has two steel plates with small projections on them that rub each other when you engage the hammer mode. This moves the chuck back and forth in the direction you are drilling multiple times per chuck revolution. So you get lots of little bumps of the bit into what you are drilling. Force is determined by how hard you lean on the drill.

More expensive hammer drills have mechanisms, I think they pneumatic at least sometimes, possibly always, that move the bit further back and forth and more slowly. So you get a harder bang of the bit into the piece you are drilling. Usfull, possibly necessary, when drilling larger holes. Some have positions where they do not rotate the bit, just bang back and forth. So you can use them as light duty jackhammers.

My opinion is that if I ever need the more expensive kind, I will rent it. If I had a project where I needed a lot of large holes, maybe I would buy one.

Jim